Audi A1: city slacker

There’s been plenty of hype around Audi’s A1, not a little of it coming from Audi itself. We take the new city runabout for a spin in Berlin

As night falls we pass the Brandenburg Gate and steer over to the Art House Tacheles, a huge wedding-cake of a building from the early 20th century that became, after the fall of the wall, a hub for radical artists. Two decades on, it emits another whiff of cynicism - it houses clubs and galleries but they seem too self-consciously alternative. The surrounding bars are full of tourist-targeted eastern-block kitsch. Capitalism selling Communism.

And that's the sense you get with the A1. On the surface it might be an admirable effort to bring the engineering values of one of Germany's noblest carmakers to a wider audience. But look harder and it turns out to be a bit of a mirage.